Neuralink has received the green light from the ethics committee for the recruitment of patient volunteers in order to begin the first clinical trials of brain implants in humans. Its brain-computer interface will be the first to attempt to restore or improve impaired motor functions. Interested candidates must register on the register dedicated to this purpose.
There start-up American Neuralink, one of the companies of Elon Musk, has been working for years on projects implants cerebral. She is currently looking for the first patient volunteers to experiment with her technology. Americans over the age of 18 with severe physical disabilities can register to participate in the experiment.
It is as part of a study called Prime (for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface ) that Neuralink will experiment with a new medical trial protocol involving its interface |833b975c6f3aaf96a72f93c62e2c638a|-computer fully implantable and wireless. Its goal is to allow disabled people to control various devices by thought, such as controlling the cursor or the keyboard of a computer. In the longer term, this technology could also help treat Parkinson disease or epilepsy .
These first trials are aimed primarily at people who are quadriplegic due to a spinal cord injury or suffering from multiple sclerosis. More generally, any person residing in the United States, having reached the age of majority in their state and suffering from quadriplegia, paraplegia, loss of vision , loss of hearing, inability to speak or even amputation of a member is invited to participate in the program and to register in the patient register just put online by Neuralink.
Once in place, the “N1” implant will transmit brain signals to a application responsible for decoding them and transforming them into movement. The start-up finally specifies that under no circumstances will it sell the data collected, even if it will of course be shared with its research partners.
Before testing its technology on humans, Neuralink has already done so on animals. A video posted online by the start-up in 2021, for example, showed a first successful experiment on a monkey, capable of playing a small basic video game. However, it was only this year that Neuralink finally received the fire green from the American health authorities to be able to test its brain implants on humans.
Neuralink will be able to test its chips on humans for “symbiosis with artificial intelligence”
Elon Musk has reason to rejoice: his start-up Neuralink has just received the green light from American health authorities to test connected brain implants on humans whose objective is to allow humanity to achieve “ a symbiosis with artificial intelligence .
he start-up Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s companies, announced this Thursday, May 25 on Twitter that it had received approval from the American health authorities to test its connected brain implants on humans. “ This is an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people ,” declared the Californian company, specifying that “ recruitments for clinical tests are not yet open .
Neuralink designs connected devices to be implanted in the brain to communicate with computers directly through thought. They must first be used to help people who are paralyzed or suffering from neurological diseases. The start-up then wants to make these implants sufficiently safe and reliable so that they fall under the elective surgery (comfort) — people could then spend a few thousand dollars to equip their brains with computing power. For Elon Musk, these chips must allow humanity to achieve a “ symbiosis with artificial intelligence (AI)”, in his words from 2020, spoken at the conference annualof the company.
The billionaire fears that AI systems will overtake humans and one day take control. In March, he founded X.AI , a new AI company, likely to compete with OpenAI, the company that designed ChatGPT, a successful generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and producing all kinds of text on demand.
Work faster to stay ahead of the competition
” We are now confident that Neuralink’s device is ready for humans, so the timeline depends on the approval process of the FDA», the American drug agency, he indicated at the end of November on Twitter, a month after having bought the social network. The FDA did not immediately respond to a request from AFP.
The boss of Tesla and SpaceX (space exploration) is used to making risky predictions, particularly regarding the autonomy of the electric cars You’re here. In July 2019, he estimated that Neuralink could carry out its first tests on individuals in 2020.
For now, prototypes the size of a small coin have been implemented in the skull of animals. Several monkeys are thus capable of “playing” video games or “typing” words on a screen, simply by following instructions.eyesthe movement of the cursor on the screen.
At the end of November, the start-up also took stock of its latest advances in the design of a robot-surgeon and the development of other implants to be installed in the spinal cord or the eyes, to restore mobility or vision . In 2022, Elon Musk urged Neuralink employees to work faster. “We will all be dead before anything useful happens,” he told them at a meeting last year, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
